


Common Ground

by thirty2flavors



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 19:58:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3301676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Common Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2009 pre-The End of Time, so apologies for some minor canon inconsistencies.

 

   
Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common: they live in London.

Rose lives with Jimmy, a boyfriend who plays guitar and drinks too much and loves her only when he feels like it. It happens just often enough to make Rose to think it might happen more often, and so she laughs at her mates when they say she’s crazy and ignores her mum when she begs Rose to come home. Rose Tyler is eighteen, and she knows nothing of love.

Martha lives with two friends in a flat by her university. Most nights when her friends are down at pubs, Martha sits on the comforter of her bed, her legs folded, textbooks out in front of her and the end of her pen in her mouth. She studies rather than go out because between Leo and Tish she’s always been the responsible one, because getting into med school is hard and staying in is harder, and because all her life Martha Jones has wished she could fix things.

Donna lives with her family and wishes she didn’t. She wishes she had a nice flat and a high-paying job and a handsome husband who knows how to cook, and while she’s at it she wishes for a nice flock of flying pigs, and a season of Big Brother where she doesn’t hate all the houseguests. She watches television and reads gossip magazines and celebrity blogs. She drowns herself in the detailed lives of the rich and famous, people powerful enough to change the world (or at least rock it a little bit) because mostly, she wishes she were important.

Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common, and that’s about it.

\--  
  
Do you want to come with me?

It comes about differently, each time. With Rose he has to ask twice, because it’s not until that second time that she’s selfish enough to say yes. Martha has to work for it; she saves his life and fights his battles and stares down witches and Daleks and the Doctor himself before she gets her invite. Donna says no and then changes her mind a minute too late, so she has to she invite herself along, hatboxes and all.

It comes about differently, but it’s the same offer each time.  
  
Do you want to come with me?

I need someone. Drop your life and everything in it and come see the great big wonderful awful stunning heartbreaking horrific beautiful inspiring devastating gripping universe. You’ll see death and it won’t be safe and when you finally go home, by choice or by force, you won’t be the same.

Now, do you want to come with me?

Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common: they all say yes.

\--

All three of them fall in love with the Doctor.

For Rose it’s a slow, creeping thing that seems to blindside her suddenly; it tackles her from behind and never lets go, not when he changes his face, not when he’s sixty miles below the surface of a scientific impossibility, not even when he’s on the other side of a white wall covered in cosmic police tape reading _do not cross_. It never dims, never wavers, and not for one second does she regret it, not even when her grip isn’t strong enough and she lets go of that lever.

Martha trips into love with a genetic transfer and can’t find her footing after that. Martha Jones is clever, rational and logical, and loving a nine-hundred-year-old alien with enough emotional baggage to fill the Grand Canyon is anything but. It feels like groping around in the dark, and the fact that no amount of clear thinking makes it go away scares Martha more than any of the aliens she’s seen.

It’s different for Donna — less blinding and all consuming but very much there, a quiet, constant part of her she can never really ignore, not even when he fully deserves a smack. It’s not a romance thing; she doesn’t doodle his name in a notebook and cover it in cartoon hearts, and he doesn’t make her giddy and giggly the way Lance once did. But in the second he’s gone to die on a Sontaran ship she’s devastated. When he comes back in one piece, she decides suddenly and without pomp or circumstance that she’ll spend the rest of her life with him, because he needs her and she needs him, too.

Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common: it changes their lives.

\--

Rose is still blinking back tears when she steps up the ramp towards the console. The Doctor, still in his stolen tux, pretends not to notice, though out of awkwardness or an attempt to preserve her privacy, Rose can’t say.

Mickey Smith really loved her, she thinks, with a sudden clarity she’s never had before. He loved her in the quiet, dedicated way that real people love each other, normal people, people who get married and have children and argue over what colour to paint the kitchen. It was the sort of love anyone would be lucky to have, really, and here she’d gone and thrown it away in favour of the terrifyingly intense love she feels for an alien whom she doubts will ever do more than hold her hand.

She thinks maybe she should regret that.

She tugs at the hem of her maid’s apron and swallows to clear her through. “Think I’m gonna change,” she says quietly, flinching at the way her voice wobbles.

The Doctor looks at her and nods, somber. “Yeah.” He hits a button on the console, quiet, and then says, “Why don’t we stop by your mother’s for a bit?”

She nods, not trusting her voice, and starts towards the hallway, but the Doctor stops her.

“Rose,” is all he says, and he opens his arms, and Rose hides her face in his chest, eyes squeezed shut.

Mickey Smith really loved her, and she let him go in favour of Daleks and Cybermen and running, running, running.

She thinks maybe she should regret it. She doesn’t.

\--

Martha sits on the porch next to Tim and tries not to let her hands shake, tries not to listen for the conversation she knows Joan and John must be having. They’ve shaken her, these last few weeks, more than she wants to admit, and it’s everything she can do to sit back and let John Smith work at this on his own.

_What exactly do you do for him?_

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

The porch creaks as John steps out of the house and Martha holds her breath, but then he looks at her with an expression so dark and dangerous she recognizes the Doctor in an instant. It takes all her self-control not to leap up from her seat and cling to him in relief. Instead, she gives the smallest of smiles, and he doesn’t smile back.

_Why does he need you?_

As she watches him go, she wonders how much he remembers and how much he’ll pretend he doesn’t remember. She wonders if he’ll ask Joan to come with them. She wonders if Joan will say yes.

_He’s lonely._

Martha wonders if she’s helping at all.

\--

Donna gets back to the library with a pounding heart and a lifetime of memories that never happened. She wants to find Lee, know if he’s real; she wants to scream and cry and maybe punch something, because you can’t just give someone fake children and take them away and leave that maternal tug behind. She wants to strangle that stupid archaeologist for thinking it was a good idea to bring them to this Godforsaken planet when they could be sun tanning on a beach.

But first she needs to see the Doctor.

That smarmy rich bloke is the only one she can find, and when he tells her the Doctor went off to use himself as a living memory stick, Donna breaks into a sprint. She’s going to kill him. First he tries to trap her in the TARDIS, and then he tries to martyr himself for the millionth time. He needs constant supervision. If he’s dead, she’s going to resurrect him just so she can kick his scrawny arse.

She’ll always feel guilty for the relief that washes over her when she finds it’s River’s body hooked to the machines, the Doctor sitting safe and haunted on the ground.

“People do that too often,” he says quietly, later, voice quiet and eyes downcast.

“Do what?”

“Die for me.”

“I would,” she says automatically. He stares and she feels herself turn red, but she shrugs her shoulders. “You’re more important than I am.”

“That’s not true.” He says it with such conviction that Donna almost believes him.

\--

Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have one thing in common: they live in London.

Rose lives in a London with a President and zeppelins in the sky. She loves a Doctor with only one heart and worries about the Doctor with two. She eats chips on Saturdays and defends the Earth, sometimes with Torchwood and sometimes without it. She has dinner with her mum on Sunday and pushes her brother on the swings, and sometimes she wonders what life would be like if the mad man in leather had never asked her a second time. She thinks it would have saved her a lot of heartbreak, but cost her even more joy.

Rose Tyler is twenty-six, and she knows plenty about love.

Martha lives with a doctor with one heart and a ring on one finger. He’s a good man, a brave man, and she loves him with both feet on the ground. She juggles her job and her family and walks with her back straight; she loves what she does and does it well, and though she keeps the Doctor on speed-dial she knows most times, she doesn’t need him. She knows she can’t fix everyone, that sometimes things are too far gone.

Martha Jones knows that will never stop her from trying.

Donna lives with her family and wishes she didn’t, so she starts to save. She has dreams she can’t explain about things that don’t exist, and some early Sunday mornings she throws on a pair of trainers and jogs because she wants to run. She has tea with her friends and gossips about stars with strange baby names, and she has tea with her grandfather on a hill and gazes at stars she can’t name. She looks for a job she likes enough to want to keep, and she looks for a husband who knows that she’s important. She doesn’t know when that last variable became so significant, only that it has.

And Donna Noble is done settling.

\--

Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble have several things in common. They’ve seen time and space and the ends of worlds. They’ve met ancient civilizations and brand new ones. They’ve lived on board an old wooden ship with an endless interior, and they’ve loved an ancient man with too many skeletons to fit in one closet. They’ve caused death and felt destruction and had their hearts broken.

They live in London, and they’ve saved the world.


End file.
